The Neuroscience Of Musical Perception, Bass Guitars And Drake

Maria Fabrizio for NPR In June of 2001 musician Peter Gabriel flew to Atlanta to make music with two apes. The jam went surprisingly well. At each session Gabriel, a known dabbler in experimental music and a founding member of the band Genesis, would riff with a small group of musicians. The bonobos – one named Panbanisha, the other Kanzi — were trained to play in response on keyboards and showed a surprising, if rudimentary, awareness of melody and rhythm. Since then Gabriel has been working with scientists to help better understand animal cognition, including musical perception. Plenty of related research has explored whether or not animals other than humans can recognize what we consider to be music – whether they can they find coherence in a series of sounds…